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There's very little admirable about being a pirate. There's very little functional about a pirate. There's very little real about a pirate.

Will Oldham

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Will Oldham
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: December 24
Actor
Guitarist
Musician
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Songwriter
Television Actor
Louisville
Kentucky
Joseph Will Oldham
Bonnie Prince Billy
Bonnie Prince Billy
Functional
Pirate
Admirable
Littles
Little
Real

More quotes by Will Oldham

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I don't usually read reviews. I usually read the interviews, just because I figure it's a good way to try to do them better if I ever have to do them again.
Will Oldham
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On days where I feel the karma is in balance I'm not afraid of death. And when I feel it's weighing heavily on the negative side, then I get very scared and just think about eternal damnation and how unpleasant that would be.
Will Oldham
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Every recording session and tour is a very valuable time to me in terms of getting to spend time with the musicians - whether they're friends and family or people I've just met - because I don't have a job where I get to interact with people everyday.
Will Oldham
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A record is something that isn't real or true. It's like cinema. It's a construction of something hyper-real and surreal and unreal all at the same time. You make a space that doesn't really exist. One of the big joys of being in this line of work is building the recorded versions of the songs.
Will Oldham
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I have more respect for somebody who points at his ideal - in this case, the ideal of the pirate - and then becomes something that's more radical, more exciting, more subversive than a pirate could ever be.
Will Oldham
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I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like “Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn’t a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself”. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt.
Will Oldham
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When I listen to little fourth-dimension artifacts, they're like they were made as time capsules in the first place. You know that when you're writing the song and recording the song, you're already sending a message to the future listener, whoever and wherever and whenever that will be.
Will Oldham
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I don't like going to cities. I don't mind maybe being in a city sometimes for a few hours, but I pretty much don't like cities. I don't even like passing through them.
Will Oldham
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When I was a kid, I always thought that acting was going to be the way to go.
Will Oldham
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I was worried before I saw the play 'The Seven Storey Mountain', thinking I don't really want to see a play about Thomas Merton. He probably wouldn't have either, ideally. Then it isn't. It's more about us and it's about our relationship to what he may or may not have thought about. It's its own thing completely.
Will Oldham
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It's O.K. to accept good fortune.
Will Oldham
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My hope has always been that each record could have its own audience. Of course, it's awesome to have a cumulative audience for more than one record, but I like the idea that there could be a record that an individual might like.
Will Oldham
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Sometimes we need to tell ourselves that we're not going to do certain things, just in order to stay sane.
Will Oldham
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A vocal performance “Coming Together” is hard, but it's the kind of hard that if you work hard enough at it, you can do it and it feels great, because it was so hard. So we'll continue maybe even over the next couple of years to perform that and to expand our collaborative repertoire.
Will Oldham
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I have a mantra that kind of explains my feelings on this subject, which is, The past is the present is the future. When you're recording something, you're making something that will exist in the future.
Will Oldham
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It's good when someone says, Would you write a song for this purpose, or would you record a song for this purpose, or would you help me realize this song, again, for this purpose.
Will Oldham
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As it turns out, as an adult I can have a very unpleasant, fierce and unforgiving temper at times. But I don't think I had that when I was a kid.
Will Oldham
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We always keep things very, very simple. We can make a respectable living playing a smaller room that somebody else couldn't, because they're spending a lot of money. If we can't get a show up and deliver with what we almost intrinsically have in our brains and our pockets, then I don't really want to do it.
Will Oldham
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I still make music. I still write music and I record music, I just don't trust music promotion [and] distribution right now enough to record a new set of diligently worked-upon compositions. I do trust the audience and the audiences very much.
Will Oldham
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I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.
Will Oldham